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The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive efficiency measures to estimate the performances of OECD and non-OECD countries. A Russell directional distance function that appropriately credits the decision making unit not only for increase in desirable outputs but also for the decrease of undesirable outputs is derived from the proposed weighted Russell directional distance model. The method was applied to a panel of 99 countries over 1991 and 2003. This framework also decomposes the comprehensive efficiency measure into individual input/output components’ inefficiency scores that are useful for policy making. The results reveal that the OECD countries perform better than the non-OECD countries in overall, goods, labor and capital efficiencies, but worse in bad and energy efficiencies.

A multi-activity DEA model with variable returns to scale is proposed to provide information on the efficiency performance of organizations with inputs shared among several closely-related activities. The model is applied to study the case of 279 farmers’ cooperatives in Taiwan. The results provide overall and individual performance measures for each activity as well as suggestions for future improvement. Inter-firm networking should be strengthened and thus policies that promote the consolidation of TFCs will not be sufficient to meet the public goal of institutional reform.

This paper addresses the question how team production promotes efficiency of a firm when some inputs can be rewarded on the basis of outputs but some cannot because they are shared among outputs and non-separable. A multi-activity DEA model with variable returns to scale is proposed to provide information on the efficiency performance for organizations with inputs shared among several closely related activities. The model is applied to study the case of 279 farmers' associations in Taiwan. The result suggests that it is important to improve the efficiency of the non-profit oriented activities to improve their overall performances. Three out of four departments of TFAs can gain from economies of scale through expansion, while the remaining one gains through contraction. Thus, policies promoting structural adjustment and consolidations of TFAs would not be inconsistent with public interests.